FDM external reports

One of the troubles that I have with FDM online C# application – it's working under Linux/Mono environment and use the Carlos/AG XML-writer to create the Excel-compatible reports. This library is working fine, but the XML-files are very big.

Also there is no way to convert these XML-s into PDF for example.

To solve it I made the special interface from C# to PHP code using mySQL:

1. C# generates the data for excel report in the format [row, column, text_data]
2. Places these data into the mySQL table
3. Execute the PHP-script by the link (Response.Redirect)
4. The PHP-script opens the excel-template file (native *.xls)
5. Open the mySQL table
6. Write the data cells into the excel template from this table
7. Save the result as an Excel xls-native file and send it into response

So we have native small excel97 generated from data by C# code.

Of course the script clear the temporary table 'external_report' every time on complete.

The library PHPExcel allow also to save excel spreadsheets in PDF-format, that's useful for email robots.